Malala's Dad Should Have Won Peace Prize

One year ago, a young Talib in Pakistan's Swat Valley boarded a school bus crammed with 20 girls and fired three shots. Since, Malala Yousafzai has gone from lying in a hospital bed to addressing the United Nations on July 12, her 16th birthday, to being a leading contender for the Nobel Peace Prize [won Friday by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons].

But as much as the world loves Malala, could world peace have been better advanced by awarding the prize to her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai? The founder of the girls' school Malala attended, he is an anomaly in his area of Pakistan — a progressive man who understands the value of educating girls. Without her dad, there would be no Malala, the confident, literate, English-speaking activist.

As Adam Ellick, a filmmaker who created a documentary featuring Malala before she became a household name, told Time, "This is a story about a father and a daughter, more than a story about a girl." Describing Ziauddin's education activism, Ellick said, "Her father has a sort of revolutionary commitment to his cause. He is an incredibly unique and complex person."

But for the status of women to improve, men with Ziauddin's mindset can't be unique; they must be commonplace. The cold, hard reality is that in areas of the world where men tyrannically hold all power, the situation of women and girls will only advance if men voluntarily relax their vise-like grip over women.

We can create rap videos honoring Malala and bestow her with the world's top prizes, but at the end of the day, it's often men who execute the kind of change Malala is advocating. Less than a century ago, American women got the right to vote because a critical mass of men experienced "indigenous preference shifts," to use Foreign Policy contributor Christian Bayer Tygesen's term. And that was in a country where suffragettes could at least freely organize and take to the streets en masse.

Malala's father himself acknowledges the crucial role that progressive men play in accelerating social change in male-dominated societies. In remarks this March in London, in which he made an analogy to whites' support for Martin Luther King's activism, he said, "In a male-dominated society, change will come and change could be initiated by men. ... The journey which girls can travel in 100 years, if they are accompanied by their male partners — brothers, fathers — it could be just a few years, five years, six years."

Ziauddin Yousafzai has faced death threats. He has had to sleep away from home in order to stay alive and protect his family. His passionate efforts should have made him as much of a Nobel Peace Prize candidate as Malala was.

P.J. Aroon is copy chief at Foreign Policy, where this first appeared.